Tag Archives: freedom

Progressives and Freedom

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From The Wall Street Journal:  Progressives are now actively lying about the National Federation of Independent Business because that organization is the formal lead plaintiff in the Obamacare lawsuit, which ruling the Supreme Court is scheduled to announce today.

Here’s what’s going on.

The chairmen of the House Progressive Caucus, Democrats Raul Grijalva [D, AZ] and Keith Ellison [D, MN], [wrote] a letter accusing the NFIB of acting against “the best interest of small business owners” and “the popular opinion of the American small business community.”

Because, of course, all those 300,000 small business NFIB members adore Obamacare.  These guys say so.

Then the WSJ notes:

…among the four million small businesses eligible for new tax credits if they provide health insurance for their workers, a mere 170,300 have signed up.

Hmm….

And they ask:

…if the NFIB is as unrepresentative as liberals claim, then why have its ranks grown by 5% since it became a plaintiff in the ObamaCare suit?

And they add:

Some 65% [of NFIB members, in an NFIB poll of its membership] believe ObamaCare will do the opposite [i.e., will increase health care costs] and 77% believe it will result in a higher tax burden, which are among the reasons the group joined the suit. One in five small businesses believes it’ll be forced to alter the benefits it offers employees.

Yeah.  That’s broad-based support for Obamacare, all right.  It’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.

Paper Tiger

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There has been a disturbing development in the South China Sea, an area of the world toward which Our government claims it’s pivoting as central to American security.

Scarborough Shoal is a dinky little set of islands lying 140 miles west of Luzon Island, Republic of the Philippines, and 750 miles south of the People’s Republic of China.  This is a wholly unremarkable set of islands, except for the rich fishing and the equally rich oil deposits below the bottom of the region there.  And it’s entirely within the Philippine 200 mile Economic Exclusion Zone.

Because of its wealth, the PRC sent its fishing vessels and its armed patrol boats to the area in a naked attempt to occupy it.  The Philippine navy responded with two of its coast guard cutters, and the face-off lasted until a typhoon forced everyone to leave.

President Obama’s response?  Against the backdrop of a 1951 treaty that binds us to the defense of the Republic of the Philippines and that’s still, nominally, in force, Obama did nothing.  Nada.  Just meekly watched from the sidelines (if he was paying even that much attention).  He did not execute his favored tactic of getting a coterie of nations together to cry out and shake their collective finger very firmly at the Chinese.  He sent no USN destroyer to the area.  He raised no objection at all.  He left our ally to twist in the wind.

While this was going on, the PRC also sent a fishing boat into the territorial waters of the Republic of Palau, another dinky little island—population 21,000—way on the other side of the Philippines.  Palau objected, and when the Chinese vessel refused to leave, they fired on it, captured it, and forced the Chinese to pay a fine for their trespass.

As the WSJ (not quite) put it, it’s a sad day when the government of a tiny speck of an island shows more courage in standing up to an enemy than does our own President.

Hope and Change

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The last 3½ years have seen a lot of this slogan.  While the hope—for the better—waned long ago, President Obama has, in fact, achieved quite a lot in the way of change.  Here are some of those changes:

He got Obamacare rammed through, albeit in the dark of night in a wholly, cynically, partisan manner, and he did it without a single Progressive (or Republican, come to that) congressman actually reading the bill prior to voting on it—some proud in their ignorance.  This bill achieves quite a lot: it lets children extend their childhoods and parental dependencies to their 26th year, by staying on mumsy’s and popsy’s health insurance policies.  It adds to the Federal deficit with its trillion-dollar costs.  It lets you, taxpayers, pay for coverage for an additional 20+ million health insurees.  It nationalizes the health care and health insurance industries.

He got Dodd-Frank rammed through in the same manner and with the same level of Congressional ignorance.  And pride of ignorance.  This bill also achieves quite a lot.  It creates a fourth branch of government in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Financial Stability Oversight Council.  These two agencies are wholly unaccountable to the Congress—and so to us—are not under control of the President, and at least the CFPB’s budget comes, on demand, from the Federal Reserve System.  Yet these two will, single-handedly and without oversight, determine whether financial institutions will be allowed to do business (vis., extend loans or credit of any sort—even at your corner mom and pop grocery store) and the conditions under which they will be allowed to do so.

He’s achieved a trillion-dollar cut in our defense capacity at a time of rising PRC aggressiveness, a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Iran, and an expansive, grasping Russia.  This includes a shrinking Navy, a gutted Army, and an Air Force with little capacity for anything other than looking pretty in fly-bys.

In an apparent nod to an earlier Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, he’s leaking every cyber-warfare and counter-terrorism secret we used to have to the news outlets.  Apparently, if we have no secrets, other gentlemen have no need to resist the temptation to read ours.  Or he subscribes to the theory that if we tell our enemies everything we have, we don’t need to spend our resources trying to figure out what they know about us (another savings!).  Or both.

He’s instructed his DoD to desist using unpleasant interrogation techniques.  And, since he believes our enemies have no knowledge of anything that’s of intelligence value at all, he’s instituted a program of killing them rather than capturing them and having to figure out how to hold them and question them.  And he brags about personally selecting, by name, the ones that are to be assassinated—a Roman circus thumbs down from the Emperor.

No, Obama has wrought enormous change.  Just all of it has been destructive of our great nation.

We need to fix this.

The Progressive Endgame

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What Progressives don’t understand—won’t accept—is that, as Eric Falkenstein wrote

People get most of their pleasure, and meaning, being useful to others, which includes inspiring the admiration or happiness of others by one’s actions. Every time I make my daughter squeal with delight makes me thankful to be alive, because I know she really loves me, and I work to provide her with things and habits that will make her prosper, and hope that at some point after I’m gone she will remember me with sincere gratitude.

This made especially in the actual community interactions of individuals.  Progressives are only willing to help their fellows by government diktat, not directly with their personal resources.  I’ve written elsewhere about who donates to charity, for instance, but it bears repeating: Conservatives donate 3.5% to 4.5% of their incomes; Liberals just 1.25% to 1.5%.  And further,

A healthy wage is a strong correlate with one’s usefulness to non-family members, especially if you work in field without a lot of regulation.

Adam Smith understood this.  John Locke and our Founders understood this.  The “invisible hand” and the existence of a social compact both are founded on the not-so-enlightened self-interest—the greed—of the individuals participating in the commerce and in the formation of the social compact.  Free commerce, and the republican government over which the compact members are sovereign, are what lead to the greatest material and moral prosperity of the individuals involved.  The first is self-evident.  The second derives from that material prosperity: being useful to others, indeed, satisfying our duty to others (which involves such mundane things as honoring our commitments, here to provide our mutual support to defend and preserve our—and our fellows’—individual and several inalienable Rights, to help those less fortunate than ourselves, and so on) is enormously facilitated by personal prosperity (which, just incidentally, also creates community prosperity): we have more wherewithal with which to satisfy our individual obligations (which are, don’t forget, individual, not collective).

Falkenstein concludes

[Eric Hoffer considered that] intellectuals found free societies a threat because such societies didn’t need mandarins directing them, and if not flattered would help incite the masses to some sort of revolution.  A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding, and so those unhappy with their own meaningless affairs will focus on minding other people’s business.  Hoffer noted one must not merely provide for those without meaning in their lives, but provide against them, because in a democracy and market economy their preferences will have power.  Those who see their lives as inferior and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom, and this can cause a Republic to fall to a democracy, and ultimately a tyranny.

Thus,

In other words, Hoffer describes the essence of the Liberal [I say Progressive—ed.] desire to micromanage society into perfect equality at the expense of liberty.  A coalition of intellectuals and the underclass, both of whom feel unappreciated.  We haven’t figured out a good outlet for these do-gooders, or a good way for those without a purpose to find life rewarding, so they continue to plague us with their plans and angst.

Free Speech and the UN

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There is a carefully sub rosa international attack on free speech in progress, and unless our government takes a more active role than it has been, that attack is going to have very serious negative repercussions right here at home.  Gordon Crovitz described this in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

The UN’s International Telecommunications Union is hosting a World Conference on International Telecommunications this December, which will be attended by all 193 of the UN member nations, including the US.  This meeting has been utterly devoid of publicity, and any knowledge we have about the agenda and goals have come to us only through leaks.  But here’s what we know, according to Crovitz.

A 200+ page “planning document” indicates the UN’s goals for the conference, and Eli Dourado, a George Mason University researcher, summarized the document’s contents thusly:

These proposals show that many ITU member states want to use international agreements to regulate the Internet by crowding out bottom-up institutions, imposing charges for international communication, and controlling the content that consumers can access online.

The proposals include the following:

  • give countries authority over “the information and communication infrastructure within their state”
  • require that online companies “operating in their territory” use the Internet “in a rational way”

Since these proposals come from the People’s Republic of China, this means government authorities and government definitions of “rational way.”

Other proposals would actually let the UN regulate Internet content:

  • “protect” against computer malware or spam
  • inspect private communications
  • measure Internet traffic along national borders and bill the originator of the traffic
  • give the UN authority over allocating Internet addresses, replacing ICANN, the self-regulating body that presently ensures the stability of the Internet

These proposals come from Russia and Iran; although amazingly, Europe supports the billing drive (perhaps not so amazingly considering the penchant for government controls that EU member nations have).

So far, our government’s reaction to this assault on free speech—and on American free speech—has been…muted.  The best the Obama administration has been able to do is to mumble about

“unnecessary and beyond the appropriate scope” of UN regulation

and

the text [of the planning document] suggests that the ITU has a role in content-related issues.  We do not believe it does.

This is a far cry from the bolder response we took took when the UN’s UNESCO became too ideological and not enough concerned with science and education: we cut off funding to the organization.

This administration needs to become a whole lot more forceful in opposing this attempt to grab the Internet and to use that control to stifle free speech.